De-bunking Fundraising Myths – Part 12 (of 12)

We’ve all heard myths about fundraising. These often lead us to do the exact opposite of what we should be doing to raise money. We’ll be running a twelve part series de-bunking fundraising myths to take a close look at these false assumptions about giving.

This is the twelfth and final in the series, if you’ve missed the others you can go back and ready them (or you read all of them in the book Beyond Fundraising: A Complete Guide to Congregational Stewardship in Chapter 1: The Spiritual Roots of Stewardship). We all feel the pinch during an economic downturn; however, this does not spell disaster for our faith communities.

As always, we encourage you to leave comments.

Fundraising Myth #12

Myth: A financially healthy faith community is one that receives all of its operating budget money from congregants’ annual financial commitments.

Truth: Not necessarily. Fundraising consultants suggest that annual financial commitments should represent at least 80 percent of the total operating budget, but there is one other important factor: the distribution of those financial commitments. A financially healthy church has an annual median commitment that is almost the same as its annual average commitment.